Defining meat quality
Much has been written about meat quality. Specific scientific journals are dedicated to publishing original research on meat quality and textbooks regularly appear in which the latest scientific reports are collated, analysed, interpreted and presented in an easily assimilable form for scholars, industry and lay persons. So, how does one define meat quality in a few words? Traditionally meat quality is either eating quality or processing quality, implying that quality is directly associated with usage.
Eating quality comprises palatability, wholesomeness, and being free of pathogens and toxins. Palatability includes tenderness, flavour, residue, and succulence. Each of these criteria is again dependent on a long list of other factors which include the animal's age and gender, the live animal's physiological state and the biochemistry of the post-mortem muscle, fat and connective tissue, carcass composition and the contribution of the feed to flavour, protein and fat accretion and the characteristics of each of these, as well as the effect of genetics on the character of tissues and metabolism. Defining meat quality is therefore an intricate exercise because the concept is multifaceted.
If meat quality is directly associated with usage, then the user becomes a factor in the quality equation. Defining users or consumers is in itself a science, so for the purposes of this discussion, the meat user may be a person living in a traditional rural setting where resources and choices are limited or a city person where resources and choices are more readily available. The commonality between these would be the food-value and the pleasure-value in eating meat.
Objective descriptions of meat quality generated in a laboratory have the value of understanding the underlying factors that affect the different meat quality characteristics with the purpose of being able to control and improve them. The challenge is therefore to interpret and apply the knowledge in terms of the users’ requirements.